Quote Originally Posted by TheNecrocomicon View Post
The heroes don't have to be "shiny-perfect", the difference is that they've lately either been made disproportionately crappy jerkass nominal-protagonists or sometimes just non-existent to focus on these tropes instead.

As for a cycle, it's been a pretty prolonged swing of "dark and edgy" one-upmanship for a while now, which pretty much dates straight back to the cultural shock of 9/11, at least in the Western context.

If a hero did what Thanos did in Infinity War, they would have been labelled a Mary Sue far and wide and the movie would have been lambasted as an utterly boring snoozefest. But no, the fandom reaction seems to be "he's so cool" and excusing his "kill half of everything" genocidal plan for some warped idea of environmental protection as a result.

Anyways, like I first said, I digress. Back to dozens of pages of debate over random OotS plot minutiae?
Ueah, if the heroes did what he did it would be a snoozefest, but he's the villain and that changes how the tension works, we root for the heroes and so
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when he wins everything we are worried for the heroes, and when he loses (the second time) in Endgame we are happy that they were able to win (and sad at the losses it took to win), because even though he's the protagonist no one (is supposed to) wants him to him.


And seriously? You think that we won't go on a digression about something random, the last thread is talking about Dante's Divine Comedy, which is remarkably on-topic for it.